Film Review: Rocketship X-M (1950)
The immediate post-war years presented a curious hiatus for science-fiction cinema. Appearing as something of a collateral victim of the conflict itself, the genre’s traditional demands for significant budgets, its fascination with advanced technology—potentially tantalising for foreign spies—and its future-gazing narratives were seemingly incompatible with the more pressing, present-day needs of propaganda and wartime morale. Yet, with the dawn of the Atomic Age following the cataclysmic events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a profound cultural anxiety, coupled with a renewed technological curiosity, created fertile ground for the genre’s return. Emerging from this climate in 1950, Kurt Neumann’s Rocketship X-M (standing for “Rocketship Expedition Moon”) is frequently cited as the first “proper” post-war science-fiction feature and the inaugural sound film to depict an interplanetary voyage. Its historical position as a milestone is undeniable; its enduring legacy, however, is almost entirely defined by its rapid, cheapjack production and its subsequent embodiment of every cliché that would come to characterise—and later be mercilessly ridiculed in—the 1950s B-movie. To watch it today is to observe a fascinating, often awkward, and deeply symptomatic artefact: a film whose primary achievement was simply being made, and whose most resonant ideas are frequently undermined by its own execution.
The plot establishes its stakes with utilitarian efficiency. At the White Sands proving grounds, a press conference led by Dr. Ralph Fleming (Morris Ankrum) heralds the launch of RX-M, humanity’s first expedition to the Moon. Its crew is a boilerplate ensemble: the intense chief scientist Dr. Karl Extrom (John Emery), the dedicated chemist Dr. Lisa Van Horn (Osa Massen), the stalwart pilot Colonel Floyd Grantham (Lloyd Bridges), the capable navigator Major Corrigan (Hugh O’Brian), and the everyman engineer Harry Chamberlain (Noah Beery, Jr.). Their successful launch soon goes awry when a meteor swarm knocks them off course and unconscious. They awaken to discover their ship has miraculously—and inexplicably—accelerated beyond all calculations, placing them not near the Moon, but on a trajectory to Mars. Seizing the opportunity, they land and explore. What they find is a desolate, canyon-riddled world, littered with the ruins of an advanced civilisation evidently destroyed by nuclear war. The few survivors have devolved into primitive, troglodytic savages who kill Chamberlain and Extrom, and mortally wound Corrigan. Escaping back to their ship, Grantham and Van Horn—whose relationship has awkwardly blossomed—discover a critical fuel shortage, dooming them to a fatal re-entry. With their final moments, they radio their grim discoveries back to Earth. A devastated Fleming, addressing the press, vows that their sacrifice was not in vain and announces the immediate commencement of RX-M2.
The very existence of Rocketship X-M is rooted in cinematic opportunism of the most brazen sort. It was never destined to be a pioneering work. In 1950, Hollywood gossip columns were abuzz with George Pal’s Destination Moon, a Technicolor, high-budget, and scientifically rigorous adaptation of a Robert A. Heinlein story. Neumann, a German émigré director known for low-budget genre work including several Johnny Weismüller Tarzan films, had himself conceived a project titled Destination Moon, which intriguingly promised dinosaurs on the lunar surface. Pal’s superior claim to the title forced a rethink. Recognising the immense publicity surrounding Pal’s delayed production, Neumann and producer Robert L. Lippert swiftly concocted a plan: use the hype to launch a cheaper, faster competitor. Shot in a mere 18 days on a shoestring budget, Rocketship X-M was rushed into theatres a full 25 days before Pal’s film, thereby securing its place in history as one of the earliest and most blatant “mockbusters”.
Given these impoverished origins, the film’s occasional moments of competence are surprising. Neumann demonstrates a sporadic interest in plausible rocketry; the RX-M itself is a multi-stage vessel, a concept that would, of course, become fundamental to real space travel. However, these glimmers of accuracy are drowned out by a cavalier disregard for basic physics. The depiction of weightlessness is particularly egregious, being inconsistently applied and eventually abandoned altogether once the plot requires characters to move normally about the cabin. The Martian landscape, realised through the stark, otherworldly vistas of Zabriskie Point in Death Valley, is a visual high point. Neumann’s decision to tint these sequences a deep, ominous red—in contrast to the black-and-white of the Earth and space scenes—is a bold and effective stylistic choice that lends the alien world a genuinely eerie quality. Yet, this atmosphere is compromised by a baffling lapse: among the supposedly degenerate, cave-dwelling Martians, one female figure is presented as entirely, unmistakably human, shattering the carefully constructed illusion of an alien devolution.
The special effects are, unsurprisingly, a testament to the film’s budget. The launch site is represented by a single, static matte painting, while the launch sequence itself relies heavily on stock footage of German V-2 rocket. While passable for the time and money, these elements were later tampered with; in 1975, distributor Wade Williams, in a misguided attempt to “modernise” the film, inserted newly shot, inferior footage of a different rocket model. Most contemporary restorations have wisely reverted to the original cut.
Where Rocketship X-M transcends its B-movie framework is in its bleak, thematic preoccupations. Released a mere five years after the end of the Second World War and the dawn of the nuclear era, it stands as arguably the first film to directly channel the deep-seated anxiety that civilisation now possessed the means for its own total annihilation. The vision of Mars as a post-apocalyptic wasteland, its advanced society reduced to rubble and its people to primitive savagery, is a potent allegory. Dr. Extrom’s solemn pronouncement that the Martians went “from the Atomic Age to the Stone Age” is a powerfully succinct and haunting thesis statement. This trope of nuclear-induced civilisational collapse would come to dominate the science-fiction cinema of the ensuing two decades.
The film is further distinguished by its pioneering score from composer Ferde Grofé. It features one of the first prominent uses of the theremin in a film soundtrack, its haunting, oscillating tones instantly creating a sense of the uncanny and the technological. This sonic choice would establish a convention, making the theremin’s ethereal wail synonymous with the science-fiction genre for a generation.
For all its historical interest and thematic ambition, Rocketship X-M frequently fails as a piece of drama, particularly in its claustrophobic interior scenes. The developing romance between Floyd Grantham and Lisa Van Horn is painfully contrived, suffering from a palpable lack of chemistry between Lloyd Bridges and Osa Massen. Their dialogue is often stilted and melodramatic, a stark contrast to the life-and-death stakes of their situation. Even the film’s surprisingly downbeat ending, which sees the two leads accepting their doom, feels tonally disjointed—a moment of grim gravitas awkwardly grafted onto an otherwise pulpy adventure.
A persistent, unconfirmed rumour adds a layer of historical intrigue: that the uncredited hand of Dalton Trumbo, blacklisted as one of the Hollywood Ten, contributed to the script. If true, it would certainly explain the film’s unusually strong anti-nuclear, cautionary message amidst the otherwise conventional plotting.
Rocketship X-M is an important yet deeply flawed film. It is at times fascinating for its incidental accuracies, its evocative (if cheaply realised) Martian landscapes, and its prescient, sobering nuclear paranoia. Yet it is equally often a challenge to endure, bogged down by wooden performances, creaky dialogue, and scientific illiteracy. Its fate, perhaps, was sealed not by its ambitions but by its limitations. That it found a second life as a popular subject for ribbing on the satirical television series Mystery Science Theatre 3000 is entirely fitting. Rocketship X-M deserves remembrance as a historical stepping stone, a film that helped reignite a genre by proving there was an audience for tales of atomic-age anxiety and interplanetary adventure. However, its enduring appeal lies in its status as a perfect, if unintentional, primer on the charms and shortcomings of the 1950s B-movie.
RATING: 4/10 (+)
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